Tag: parenting in pain

What if Every Person Was Blind?

Published on by crashed not burnedLeave a comment

Totally different Darwinism, human evolvement but, all of us blind. 

From birth. Imagine society having alternatively developed around convenience to manage without thought or attention to sight..  Akin to our reality, except this key difference of everyone being blind.

 This radically different evolution would have tesulted in no more attention to the “lack” of sight, being the norm, than attention we ourselves pay to ordinary mechanisms utilized to compensate our human “ordinary” physical limitations.. Not possessing sight would result in normalizing certain …conveniences – those things we give little thought to unless unavailable.  A ladder, elevator. Stairs.  Analygize creation of some sort of tool, assistive devise, the purpose of which is to make up for limitations.  

Limitations caused by a factor so common such as height and our civilization’s usage of steps.  Just as petite person in our reality need utilize a step stool to get a platter from some high shelf. 

Can you imagine such a world?  Born blind into a world peopled by blind humans since the earliest of history’s tale??!! 

Of course!  We humans would have crafted such a world making sense to our having lack of sight.

That lack of sight (don’t get confused, we’re talking bout this imaginary sightless world now) necessarily leaving a vacuum, a suction humankind would have filled by necessity and imagination.  Manifested by senses intensified by usage and ordinary living.  Smells, sounds, the touch of a misty breeze, all revealing deductions ordinarily played out in television and movie stories about superheroes – but here in this blog blind world – senses attached to our intelligence instead more developed, naturally evolved, due to focus of an active creative human mind with tools at disposal.

And then I wonder just wonder.  If then, I’d wager for sure, it would be different.  

Wobbles in tone and mixups of words noticed; uneven tempo of footfalls heard; iciness of hand and warmth of brow touched upon greeting…

There would be no “you look (insert positive here)!”.

Tedium and focus to explain not so necessary.  Deductive reasoning doing that job.

(Secret… what a relief it would be.)

Yours in reality and imagination about nevergoingtobesosafetoimagine things, (it is ok to be naughty some times)

Renée

The “ugh” of “ughs” aka feeling ooogy 

Published on by crashed not burnedLeave a comment

Ever have a day when everything sucks?  Straight outta bed and first off, before reaching the bathroom, ya smash your shinbone into some furniture.  Your wallet decides since you’re in a hurry that it’s a great time to grow legs and goes missing for thirty minutes… 

…and you cannot stop imagining that a mini, muscular, boil and open sore ridden creature is sitting on your head – stabbing each of your eyeballs simultaneously.  Grinning with glee as he flexes his biceps and shoves the knives in up through your head and eyes up until those dern hilts of the knives won’t let the knives go all the way through.

Well likely you’ve not my particular trolls, but your very own that take their own shape and do their own thang.

Point being.  You feel TERRIBLE.  Poop is better, at least poop can fertilize.  You feel worse than poop.

AND THEN…

You interact with someone, a well meaning, kind person.  

The perfect person to give ya a sucker punch, because they got you all vulnerable with their good person way of being.

And it comes.

This here good person gets you with their honest impression and earnest insistence.

They get you by telling yeh “you LOOK great!” (Or “good”; or “young”; or beautiful” etc)

And your entire psyche shrivels past a curtain and into the previously concealed gap in your chest.  The barrage of complimentary comments piercing the pretense you’ve been managing.  That “yeah you feel shitty and look in the mirror and see more shitty and it just doesn’t matter cause you got no choice but to have to go on so you do and so just fuck it” kinda coping.

Here comes this not a liar type person telling you something you feel is abbbbysolutely NOT true… getting you agitated, thinking to yourself, screaming silently, “you liar, I look HORRIBLE!  Don’t you see I’m in hell? And LOOK like it?”

That there is the ugh of ughs.  The ooogy.

That disconnect between how a person perceives themselves and how others perceive the person.

It happens to everybody I know who has at least a few insecure days…

There is added oooogy when living in pain.

Because then emotions are a tad extra raw.  Raw emotions are the ultimate in causing miscommunication.

The rawness blows thoughts along the drift of thinking that somebody telling you how good you look; well they are just either genuinely thinking so….. OR are full of…bullshit.  

Those compliments ain’t true.  You’re discounting my pain.  

You forget. How I look is a but a costume, hiding pain from casual observers.  

Of course logic says they really mean it, this is your issue, another thing to process in therapy.  The journey to separate ones’ sense of self apart from the consistent pain.  To perceive correctly is challenging what with the knives in me eyes.  I do try. And try. And try.

But.

You can’t help it. Not only is this previously trusted person now viewed askew with regard to your trust in gut feelings about whether they get you – you get hit with the devastating conclusion thinking they do not comprehend.

No matter their understanding that you feel damn bad.  You are in a mental space where you are certain you MUST look terrible.

UGH

OOOGY

So how the heckenheck is someone to deal with this, with you who has this issue?

Now mind you, OF COURSE if a person thinks something positive, including about the way they perceive another person looks, go straight on and tell that person those positives.

Only, be mindful.  Recognize the person you are complimenting may be reacting internally really poorly because they feel awful and that transfers into how they feel they look.

Just know.

Be mindful.

Yours in not knowing what the heck, but knowing that being communicative and kind is a good base from which to maybe figure it out,

Renée

living through “I hate you”

Published on by crashed not burnedLeave a comment

Being a parent is not all you are.  But living with pain a person tends to search for motives, reasons, inspiration … for living with that pain.

Why do you want to live?  Have you thought about this question?  Do you just experience, whatever you may do and have done to you or with you – without wondering?  Wondering about whether there is a point, a reason, a motive that justifies it all?

I suspect anyone stumbling across this blog may well be enaged in self examination of their life.  I for one do not experience the bliss of ignorance without challenge to that deepest question of all, “why am I here”?

Because I must be here for my children.  Plain and simple.  They need me.  It isn’t merely shelter, food, and water that sustains them.  My love demonstrated through actions as wide ranging as my giving a hug, to efforts to guide my children in how they choose to perceive the world, perceive their experiences, and do so in manners that are most emotionally healthy and productive.

Defining myself by my children is forgetting something incredibly important.

I am more than my children.  Peering through the iron filings of chronic fatigue, around the stabbing knives of pain and dodging the violent trolls – I can see that I can make people laugh.  So can you.  I can create.  I can give and receive goodness.

So can you.  You may not feel it some, most, or any of the time.  And here is where you must get deliberate.

We must practice self love.  Remember that we matter and that the pain does not take away from who we are, but certainly makes it hard to remember.

We must be ACTIVE thinkers, DELIBERATE in the direction we allow our thoughts to take.

We must push against the despair, and remember we deserve to live because of ourselves, not merely for others.

Time and again I find myself weighing, am I more burdensome or worthwhile?  That burdensome and worthwhile is based upon my (biased by my own emotions) viewpoint about myself.  How very limited and certain to be inaccurate, for we struggle to see ourselves from any perspective other than our own.

Yet to be as mentally healthy as we can, we must practice self love.  Practice means having to engage in activities purposefully that make us feel good.  This could be meditating, eating a delicious meal, taking a bath.  But it need be soly focused upon treating yourself with loving kindness.

When we love ourselves, we are stronger.  Reality is, we can also be better parents when we don’t hing our worth merely upon our children’s reactions – but necessarily utilize our judgements and insights.

Yours in practicing what seems impossible,

Renée

This is no joke:

Pain-related helplessness was the only predictor for suicidal ideations among the cognitive variables.